The recent history of cellular technology may be characterized as an evolution from voice only communications services to the addition of data communications services. Originally cellular technology was designed to mimic landlines and supported only transmitting audio data, specifically data representing the voices of parties in conversation. Cellular technology evolved from supporting analog data to digital data. Accordingly, cellular technology not only could support audio data representing audio ranges larger than that of voice, such as music, but could also support digital application data, such as data for electronic mail and internet access.
Because the heritages of voice data transmission and application data transmission are different, there have been a number of efforts to match audio communications technology and data communications technology. In particular, voice data historically was transmitted over switch networks, and application data historically was transmitted over packet networks. Counterexamples certainly exist. For example, voice data could be transmitted via voice over internet protocol (“VoIP”) over a packet network. Similarly, data could be transmitted over a voice network using a modem.
Notwithstanding the aforementioned counterexamples, multi-media applications often make use of both audio and video data. Since there are scenarios where the audio data and the video data will be transmitted and received over audio communications technologies and data communications technologies respectively, the audio data and video data for the multi-media applications may become desynchronized, or have other discrepancies impacting the user's QoE.
Presently, cellular communications support smartphones and other devices that support not only audio communications but also a wide range of software multi-media applications utilizing data communications. Furthermore, user's expectations of quality have increased, such as in having television quality streaming of movies. However, present approaches for improving reception and rendering of audio and data do not take into account quality of user experience (“QoE”) and/or quality of service (“QoS”). Specifically, audio and data reception and rendering neither takes into account optimizing communications network conditions (“QoS”), nor user's perception of quality of service (“QoE”).